The Kaleidoscope series (Low tide evenings on the pier at Port Hueneme). Part I - Finding the location.

Port Hueneme is a small town on the Ventura County, about an hour North of Los Angeles, famous for its port and its Navy base. 

I had driven through the area before but never really stopped, until the evening of a fall day almost two years ago, when I thought of photographing its long, beatiful wooden pier (more info on the pier here). 

It was a sunny day and so I planned for the small excursion. As luck would have it, once I got there I found there was a storm approaching on the horizon and barely any light to take photos of the pier.  
It was cold and windy, and I had been so focused on the pier and so dissapointed that there was no light, that I almost didn't notice there was low tide. 

I read somewhere that when photographing landscapes the best photo is always in that extra walk in the area that you didn't take or on top of that rock you decided no to climb up to. It sounds somewhat pessimistic, but experience has demostrated that it is very true and an excellent piece of advise. 

I was starting to walk back to the car when I remembered the above. The pier has stairs that connect it the beach below and so, in spite of the cold, the wind and my dissapointment, I decided to go down to the beach - and then the whole landscape transformed. 

What from above had seemed like a dump, grey evening become an amazing combination of light and reflections. 
Because this beach is long and very shallow, low tides leave behind a really wide stretch of sand that somehow remains wet until the tide gets back up. 
This strecht acts like a giant mirror, reflecting light in a truly beautiful way - like a kaleidoscope.

I have been often here after this day and I know that low tides are always beatiful at this pier, especially when they happen in the evening and are combined with the subtle light of the sunset on the Pacific Ocean. But on this very first visit the moment was not just beautiful, it was spectacular because of the dramatic sky of the approaching storm.

I took hundreds of pictures that day, this one of them. 
Not for a single moment it occurred to me that to give them a try in B&W. Two years and a book by Brooks Jensen would have to go by.